We had an adventure on Friday evening, the 27th.  Marlene has been very worried about how and where to get her hair cut, now that she is in Moscow.  (I married my barber so this is no issue for me.)  Anyway we discovered a few days ago that there is a beauty salon on the first floor of our large apartment building.  We stopped in to see them a couple of days ago, to see what the joint looked like and to see if anyone could speak English.  The place looked nice but no one spoke much English.  Nevertheless we were able to make an appointment for Friday evening at 1800 hours.

Friday afternoon Marlene took Olga from the office to the shop to see if Olga could explain to the stylist what was on Marlene's mind.  Apparently the explanation worked wonderfully because Marlene says that she got a wonderful hair cut and styling.

Here is the shop as seen from the waiting area.  What is fairly interesting is that you would never guess these tiled walls and marble floor would be inside the exterior door.

Here is Marlene and Nadia starting the process.  I had exiled myself to the waiting area to read hair style magazines and watch a little porn on the TV.  (I averted my eyes to the magazines.)

Here is the finished product.  That is Marlene on the right, and Ludmilla in the background.  (My view is that this challenge is behind us and now we can move on to more important things ... like where am I going to get some meat to eat.)

It is Sunday afternoon about 5:00.  We are fairly recently returned from church and have eaten our dinner.  Marlene has been pestering me for weeks to buy some kind of meat at one of the two grocery stores we shop at.  Most of it looks so suspicious that I have not been at all interested in experimenting.  (You should see what some of the sausages look like!  Floor scrapings for sure.)  Anyway we agreed to buy some chicken breasts last evening and make crock-pot chicken soup today, so that it would be ready for us to eat when we got home from church.

It was okay, actually, not bad ... or is that the same description?  The Lord will bless her for trying.

There is a McDonald's at the metro exit we use to get to church.  I opined to Marlene as we walked toward it this afternoon, that we could solve all of my food needs if we could just eat at McDonald's on the way home from church each week.  I don't think I closed the sale.

Speaking of McDonald's here are a couple of more pictures from our jaunt there a week ago Saturday.

The lady to the right of my bald head spent her time in the restaurant putting on her make up.

This is her with her cute son.  He is about four I guess.

Marlene tried to get a picture of him chugging from that one liter bottle of Coke, but he noticed her trying to get his picture and would duck each time he saw her trying to capture him.

We told the mom her son was cute as we left our table.  She did not seem to understand our English, but we ended up both leaving the restaurant at the same time and we saw her outside pulling him on this little sled we signaled that we would like to take his picture.  She agreed, but he remained shy and would not look at us directly.

Below is the counter at Mickey D.'s as we were leaving.  I suggest you buy some stock.

We are told that all of Moscow is heated by hot water and that there are several plants around the city that generate the water.  Here is one that we can see from the office window.  When it is a clear day one can see these plants emitting vast clouds of (I'm sure EPA approved) steam.

Here are the Walker's on Friday evening.  They are the very nice couple from Weiser, Idaho who have taken us under their wings and have tried to keep us from staving and blundering too badly.  Behind them is a small alleyway that leads to the back door of the office tower in which we work.  On either side are examples of the little shops (rinnicks) that dot the streets.  They sell every conceivable thing: bags, light bulbs, meat, fish, clothing, jewelry, everything.

Sister Walker is wearing a fur coat that is about three sizes too big.  It was loaned to her by her sister-in-law (brother Walker's sister).  It has gotten so cold, zero and less, that she was forced into more than her wool coat.

Speaking of Weiser, my motorcycle-riding sons will appreciate that Weiser is about 20 miles north of Ontario, Idaho or Oregon, right on the border of the two states.  We blitzed through Ontario on our way to Portland two summers ago.

More rinnicks just to the right of  the previous photo.

Marlene and I have decided that if we buy any Russian gifts for our children they will come from these kind of stores, low overhead and all.

We were asked to do 'sharing time' in the ward's Primary this afternoon.  This is the senior Primary and the staff.  They were all good children as we told them the stories that our children had provided us this week.  I introduced us and Marlene told the Book of Mormon reading stories.  The children liked the pictures of the family and of Andy and his family around the Apache's as he got ready to go to Texas.  It was a very nice 15 minutes.

(Those Mormon moms and Mormon kids are the same everywhere in the world that you find them.)